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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Tech Tuesday: Using Pinterest for your Family History Photographs

Tech Tuesday is a blogging prompt used by the Geneabloggers group and others to help inspire bloggers to post. Today my post is dedicated to using Pinterest.
I've been aware of Pinterest for a while but I hadn't really looked into it. As I started this blog I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have another place where family members and others can just view the photographs of our ancestors. In essence, the tale of our family through pictures. With this in mind I created a Pinterest board specifically for it. The link is contained in the information section on the right hand side of this page. I will also post it here:

http://pinterest.com/michaeldavies1/tall-tales-of-a-family/

Pinterest is a social networking tool based around images. People post images that fit around a specified criteria to their Pinterest site. You have to be invited to use it but you can personally request an invite through their main webpage. After my initial request it took them a day before inviting me. Pinterest is linked to a Facebook account so you have to be careful about your settings unless you want every picture posted mirrored to your Facebook timeline.

Once on Pinterest you create something called "a board." This board can be called anything you like and about anything you like. I called mine "Tall Tales Of A Family." Original eh! You can change the name at any point but the link to the site will also change. Once a board is created you pin [upload] pictures to the site. Alternatively, if you find an image online you can pin that to the site without downloading it to your computer. Family and friends can then leave comments with each picture, a great way to share memories.

So now I have another place online that people can connect with my family history blog. It's a visually driven site and hopefully provokes enough questions that people want to find out more.

A word to the wise. If you are using photographs of living people, make sure to get their permission before you post it. This should be just the same as when blogging an article. Whenever I post a story that contains the name of someone living or the immediate family of someone living I make sure to give the living relative an advance copy and I do not post the blog until they have affirmed it. Sometimes they make suggestions that improve the story. Sometimes they notice mistakes and they always have the option to say they are uncomfortable with that story being put online. The same should definitely be true of their own photographs as well.

With all that said, why don't you hop on over to Pinterest, maybe visit my own Pinterst 'board' and see how you like it.

2 comments:

  1. What a clever way to use Pinterest! Now I'm going to lose even more time to Pinterest than I already do!

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    1. Glad you like the idea:) My family love having all the pictures in one place that they can easily access.

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